Dear Mr. Browne

I am writing a letter I have wanted to write since I first heard your music nearly 25 years ago. I was 21.

For Everyman had just been released in Tasmania, the island state I lived in south of the Australian mainland. I wanted to thank you then but was awe-struck by stars and wouldn't have dared be so familiar to write.

It was the glitter era, the social and intellectual force unleashed in the 60s was lapsing back into market determined versions of cool - platform soles, sequins and utterly vacuous sentiment. There wasn't a genuine voice of protest or social engagement to be heard. Don McLean's saccharine protest about music dying was proving quite prophetic and by 1975 most of the big voices had either succumbed to self-indulgence or had been sucked up into the market consumer vortex too.

Then you arrived.

My friends were ambivalent and weren't able to see beyond your collaboration with the Eagles, to me just the musical surface of what you were doing. They I think were suspicious of a Jackson Browne ever hitting his straps and producing a unified field out of that smooth but somehow uncomfortable mixture of religious insight, melancholy, anthem, folk, country and West Coast rock.

Different to my friends I had been exposed to large doses of religious imagery and concepts since I was little. I reveled. I loved the way your songs, like Before the Deluge, yearned for and suggested a 'better world'. Any lack of sophistication in Mr. Browne's music was for me just a matter of being patient. While my position seemed silly to worldly friends I really thought here is someone with a genuine eye and if he keeps this up, keeps refining and honing his insight, they'll sit up and take notice.

I thought it was so refreshing to at last have a voice that took the loss of direction and the uncertainties of the 70s as a real subject. It was intellectually refreshing to have someone allow himself to look beyond the here and nowness of the beats and pseudo beats, the whole folk protest thing and its card carrying atheism. (Dylan woke up to the changed mood of openness to the spiritual and thought all he had to do was hop on a religious bandwagon. How many sets of belief did he go through each year each album for how many years! Not a very authentic or very long search that one.)

Your music has always pointed to a good deal more than the recycled humanism of commercially acceptable bards like Dylan. Your music engaged me because it operated out of a world-view that was connected to something fundamental. Unlike so many others you were able to produce songs that broke free of the things they were trying to hint at something higher, spiritual, even a religious experience (For a Dancer, Fountain of Sorrow). I have often wondered what formed you, why your voice created such a powerful resonance in me. There are elements of the left and an active social conscience. But more dominant is the sense of reverent openness to the holy in every day life.

Your earlier songs seemed to uncover this in life and take it out to a staunchly secular world: a little Blake thrumming hymns out into all that darkness. There was lots of gospel too and the too-true fidelities of country but there was also something authentically prophetic. All of it comes through not so much in what you intend to say but somewhere behind or above, in that particular blend of chanted hooks, reflection and exploration in the verses and, especially in the feeling and inspired accompaniment. I'm now listening to David Crosby's harmony on To Salt Lake City. In 1999, that early song seems so awkwardly constructed, but, the sense of yearning and urgency in it, and then David's part cuts in, still a special thrill.

Song for Adam - your plain-chant-with-guitar - is another very big piece for me. I still love its mood - solemnity and longing and quiet reverence; the image of a single human figure transfigured against a dark mysterious backdrop of loss and fate. I played in an 'up tempo' folk band in the early 80s. Paul, the guitarist, loved your writing and we shared harmony parts on a few of your songs from Running on Empty. Paul took his life a few years later; a problem with meaning and purpose I think. In the years after I sometimes could not find voice for that loss, the despair of it would occasionally haunt me. I would often turn to your lovely song for consolation because it symbolized what had happened so well. To this day the reasons for his death are mysterious - I'm afraid I didn't know him well either.

And now, something I must raise, even though it is hard to do. By the 80s that special mixture of searching, sadness and longing that made the tone of your earlier work so appealing gradually gave way to a sort of polished cynicism and resignation. Probably a natural progression (given the times), but, the intellectual and spiritual promise in the earlier, acoustically centered albums seemed to submerge into the hum of synthesized effect. Your context became more consciously urban, your accompaniment a deliberate movement toward rock away from the subtleties and interest of acoustic fiddle, guitar, lone plangent voice.. What was compelling in your earlier work, that unique and lovely way of expressing things seemed to give way to a need to structure a career in an increasingly commercial market. Commercial rock on its own has such a limited range of moods and textures. I never thought it big enough to contain a Jackson Browne. I was sorry to see the gentleness of the country and folk elements disappear. It was like a young oak tree being lopped and shaped to fit into a hedge before his full character had had time to manifest.

After Running on Empty I stopped close listening to your work, I just didn't enjoy it as much. Was this shift just symptomatic of the general loss of vision after the collapse of the alternative life style movement? Maybe you'd exhausted all the possibilities of playing prophet and just wanted to move on. Even though the albums of the 80s show greater sophistication, more emphasis on technique and craft, there seems to be an easing off, a laying down of the search in the earlier work.

OK. I'm beginning to feel a bit silly. Time to move on.

If you never produce music in that earlier vein again allow me to thank you for the special moments so far. Popular music is better for having had you in it. You penetrated deeply enough to offer some spiritual direction the others, floundering around on the surface of their highly complex egos, couldnít. You gave perspective, comfort, spiritual nourishment, and, something distinctly Western at the same time. That is unique in our heavily secular culture. It contains something of what the Dalai Lama says the West has lost in losing its own spiritual roots; that our big look East is a big symptom of that loss. Did Christianity fail? Or was the shrugging off of Christianity as mere parental hypocrisy just unwillingness on the part of the baby boomers to shoulder life's awkwardness and difficulty?

I still count myself lucky to have walked into the record shop above the "Jean Scene" that day in 1975. An Eagles record had just been playing, Bowie's vacuous Jean Jeannie followed, I flicked through the covers. My ears pricked when the Eagles' Take It Easy came on. I made some remark about it. The assistant quickly turned to me and said "Oh, but heard this?" He put the For Everyman version on and, it began. Delight. That freshness and lack of commercialese. Then, Our Lady of the Well. The voice. That combination of piano, guitar and the Lindley fiddle! I nagged the shop assistant into playing the whole album. The heart in me raced. It meant I could keep parts of my beliefs and be part of youth culture too.

Please don't take the little disappointments expressed above too seriously; forgive any intrusiveness and self indulgence you find there. This letter is really just a way of finally and warmly responding to you. If you've got this far you're probably swearing under you breath that you did indeed carry the flame beyond the 80s and got better at it too! But, I think the things you've expressed in song demand engaged responses from your audiences and this is the best I can do.

My lasting regret is that, after all these years, living where I did I never got to see and hear you play live and to respond like a normal person. Thanks for many moments that were very, very fine.

A Tasmanian fan.

I don't think I will ever find a song that I love more or that captures my relationship more than Fountain of Sorrow - its just plain beautiful. I played it over and over again in 2000, and just rediscovered it again after 5 years on Itunes.

I love the word play, and the lyrics, and can almost see the sad smile. Thanks Jackson; the song is priceless.

Review of Bill Graham 75th Birthday

The entire night of Bill Graham's 75th Birthday celebration was great, but Jackson set was especially surprising. He opened with "Barricades of Heaven" and "Before the Deluge" with only guitar/ or piano and bass. Then Bonnie Raitt came out on acoustic slide and vocals for a great version of "I am a Patriot." Bonnie's slide solo was awesome. Next came the great surprise; Jackson played the rest of the set with a soul/gospel style vocal group and their bandleader and drummer (sorry, but I can't recall the name of the group, but they were all very young, 20's, and Jackson said they were recording an album with him). I can't remember all of the songs they played, but it was entirely different presentation than what you expect from a Jackson Browne concert (I've been to several). The highlight was definitly when Carlos Santana joined the group for "The Next You Hear." As Carlos was ripping into a solo behind Jackson and the groups vocals, Jackson forgot some lyrics, looked over to Carlos and blamed him for playing so good that he made him forget his lyrics.

Jackson joined the Neville Brothers for a tune later, and sang in the group finale. Other than Jackson's set the highlight of the night was definitly Bannie Raitt's duet with Aaron Neville on "A Change in Gonna Come." Great show.

Hi all, Just reading the various letters about Jackson concerts etc. You don't know how lucky you are being able to buy tickets to see Jackson. I have been a fan all my adult life and have never seen him live. Being a musician I always seemed to be playing when he came over to England on one of those very rare occasions, then I get a chance to see him last year and was rushed to hospital only days before the gig, so I still didnt get to see him. I did get the 'Going Home' DVD and Solo Acoustic 1 for Christmas though as a runners up prize and have played it a dozen or so times. I would dearly love to see him live now and am watching the site for updates of European tours. Anyway, great site, thanks,

Thank you for providing this opportunity of contact to fans of the great JB. I am an almost blind person searching for a JB fan group so that I could go to concerts with like-minded people when JB next visits England.